This being a vacation week for me, I decided to whip through a couple of relatively short books. While both books looked at the role of Islam in today's world, the two books could not have been more different from each other. The first book I finished on my vacation was Noah Feldman's The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State . Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School as well as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explores recent rise of Islamic political parties and their
desires of creating a modern Islamic state. While his book is short, and
covers a significant amount of historical ground, I found his style to
be a bit tedious. Keeping that in mind, I must give kudos to Feldman
for including enough historical background to successfully show the
reader how we arrived at the present state of domestic politics in the
Middle East and South Asia. I guess I expected a bit more from
Feldman's book, but on the whole I wasn't too disappointed. Perhaps my
expectations were a bit high. The other book I finished on my vacation was They Must Be Stopped:Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do Itby Gabriel Brigitte, a former journalist, political activist and
founder of the political action
group Act ! For America.
While I found her book quite readable and interesting, I
was turned off by her lack of scholarship. I was not fond of her
sometimes vitriolic tone, either. In my humble opinion, other writers such as Irshad Manji,Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bruce Bawer. did a much better job handling the same subject matter, and with similar viewpoints. However, since I always enjoy reading
books from perspectives different from my own, I am glad I read her book